PIJIP Fellow Swarna Latha published in the European Intellectual Property Review

Health
is the chief basis for the development of the ethical, economic,
artistic and spiritual sides of man and it is a widely accepted fact
that traditional health care systems or traditional medicine (TM)
offers a wide range of safe, cost effective, natural therapies, which
can be used alone or in conjunction with allopathic health care.
Because of this reason, these systems and therapies are used to a large
extent to meet the health care needs of the majority of people around
the world. As a result of the systematic developments and improvements,
these systems are now being used more widely by the public at national
and international levels. TM is widely practiced in most of the
developing countries. Even to this day it plays a crucial role in
health care and serves the health needs of a vast majority of people in
these countries. In Asia, around 70 per cent of the population
continues to use TM as a result of historical circumstances and
cultural beliefs.
The World Health Organization (WHO) points out that in Africa and India
up to 80 per cent of the population use TM to meet health care needs.
In China, TM accounts for around 40 per cent of all health care
delivered annually. Even in the developed countries there is a growing
demand for the traditional and complementary/alternative medicine (CAM).

TM
becomes the only affordable treatment available to poor people where
access to modern health care services and medicine is limited for
various economic, social and cultural reasons.
As mentioned earlier, TM is becoming increasingly popular in the
developed countries, because of which the drug industries are now
engaged in coming up with varieties of herbal medicines under the name
of CAM. It is found that many pharmaceutical products produced and used
in the developed countries are based on, or consist of, biological
materials sourced through reference to TM. These include compounds
extracted from plants and algae, as well as from microbial sources and
animals. Plants, in particular, are an indispensable source of such
pharmaceuticals. However, there is a myth that benefits of TM are
imperfectly known to the world.
But in reality the rapid developments of technology have given the
necessary impetus to the misappropriation of TM. Instances of
processing of molecules by most of the western companies to find out
the medicinal characteristics of the herbs and plants used for various
systems of TM and thereafter producing a new drug and granting patents
for such newly created drugs are increasing. The demand for “herbal
medicines” made up of TM has grown dramatically in recent years and often results in misappropriation of these knowledge systems,
leaving the owners of TM without any benefits. For these reasons, many
countries have called for urgent protection of TM.